Offishial News: Why Peter Bendix trusts Tim Anderson to bounce back in 2024

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🔷 There was baseball at LoanDepot Park on Tuesday, an intrasquad scrimmage involving both Marlins big leaguers and minor league backups. Kevin Barral recaps how Max Meyer, Trevor Rogers and Edward Cabrera performed and what they had to say afterwards.

 🔷 As I projected, unavailable Marlins right-hander Huascar Brazoban has been placed on the restricted list. Brazoban entered the new year as a probable pick for Miami's major league bullpen, but he is still unable to travel to the United States due to visa issues. The transaction creates a vacant spot on the 40-man roster.

 🔷 Miguel Rojas didn't really deny any of the clubhouse anecdotes that Jazz Chisholm Jr. told about him in an interview earlier this month, but he says Chisholm "crossed a line" by attacking his character. Rojas is disappointed that Chisholm did not respect his veteran teammates. Rojas doesn't sound optimistic about them mending fences in the future: "I'm not up to having a person in my life that thinks that I'm a bad person or a piece of s***."

 🔷 Louis Addeo-Weiss and Kevin Barral put the lefty-heavy Marlins starting rotation in historical context.

 🔷 I provided Marlins insight for The Good Phight's 2024 NL East preview. It includes my takes on Jazz Chisholm Jr., Sixto Sánchez, payroll and more.

 🔷 On Miami Mic'd Up with Jeremy Taché (episode embedded below), Peter Bendix justified the Marlins' signing of Tim Anderson despite severe struggles in 2023: "You can find lots of examples of players who have five, six, seven really good years in a row and then a bad year, and you can say, 'Okay, what happened to those guys the following year (this year for us)?' A lot of those guys bounced back! A lot of them bounced back to very similar levels as before. And the key thing that those guys had in common was, number one, they're not that old, they're not 37-38 years old, and number two, there were some health concerns that might have contributed to the poor season and there's reason to believe those are behind him. That is no guarantee, but you watched him during spring training. You see that he's moving really, really well, really fluidly. Some of the things that were hampering him that frankly he played through that other players probably wouldn't have played through, which in my opinion speaks very positively about Tim, but probably brought down his numbers in a way last year that might not be entirely fair."

 🔷 Elsewhere around baseball, Jordan Montgomery (1/$25M) signed with the Diamondbacks. Even with an easily attainable vesting option for 2025, it is a shockingly inexpensive deal for one of the best players in this past offseason's free agent class. Plucked from the Marlins farm system via the Rule 5 Draft, Nasim Nuñez has made the Nationals' Opening Day roster. It would be a stretch to say Nuñez "earned" the spot—he had a 2 wRC+ in spring training games—but the Nats will test him in regular season action before they consider returning him to Miami.

  🔷 Follow along with Noah Berger (@NoahBergerMedia) for live coverage of today's team workout.

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